Untold lives blog

King George III’s education included languages (English, German and Latin), sciences (physics, chemistry and astronomy), history and mathematics.  He learnt about art and architecture, and he was taught several accomplishments.  Amongst these last, he learnt to dance, to fence, to ride, music (he played the harpsichord and the flute) and to draw.  His artistic education was varied.  The artist and architect Joshua Kirby (1716-1774) was appointed as his drawing master in 1756, while George was still Prince of Wales, and taught him perspectival drawing.

In 1761, not long after George succeeded his grandfather as King of Great Britain, Kirby published The Perspective of Architecture.  The large folio volume included ‘One Hundred Copper-Plates’ with a frontispiece designed by William Hogarth, and cost three guineas ‘in sheets’ (unbound).  It was a luxurious and expensive volume, dedicated to the King.  The elaborately calligraphy of the engraved dedication leaf proclaimed that the work was ‘begun by Your Majesty’s Command, carried on under your Eye, and now Published by Your Royal Munificence’.  More than that, it also included one plate for which the original had been drawn by George himself, although Kirby did not have the presumption to say so explicitly.

Plate 66 shows a colonnaded house in Palladian style.

John Kirby, The Perspective of Architecture. London, 1761. Plate 66 (Reference: 56.i.19-20)

The original drawing in pencil, pen and ink and grey wash is now in the Royal Collection, described as a ‘Perspective drawing of a classical building with pavilion wings’.  An annotation by Kirby ascribes it to his royal pupil.

Kirby and his son William were made joint clerks of the works at  in 1761.  George III’s interest in architectural drawing, also fostered by his simultaneous study of architecture with Sir William Chambers, continued for many years.  It is evident in the King’s Library (where what must have been Kirby’s presentation copy is kept) and the King’s Topographical Collection, which contains many drawings as well as innumerable architectural prints.  Both collections provide ample testimony to the range and depth of the King’s artistic and cultural interests.

Tobias Smollett. Continuation of the Complete History of England. London, 1760-65. Vol. 4 (Reference: 1608/476) 

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800


Further reading:
Jeremy Black. George III: America’s last King. New Haven and London, 2006.
John Brooke, King George III.  London, 1985

Visit our exhibition Georgians Revealed

George II succeeded his father as King of Great Britain in 1727, at the age of forty-four.  He has had a bad press ever since, for he is still seen as a dull, regimented, tight-fisted philistine. This image is far from being accurate.

George II, frontispiece. Thomas Salmon. The Chronological Historian. 3rd ed. London, 1747. (291.f.22-23) 

When George I came to England in 1714 to claim his new throne, he was accompanied by his son and daughter-in-law, George and Caroline the new Prince and Princess of Wales.  The young couple quickly began to pursue an active cultural life, regularly attending public plays and operas and playing a key part in court life from drawing room receptions to balls.  When Prince George quarrelled with his father in 1717 (the two were not reconciled until 1720), he and his wife set up a rival court at Leicester House on the north side of what is now Leicester Square.  George I was forced to undertake an uncharacteristically lively programme of court entertainments to keep up with them.

George II was very fond of Hanover, where he had been born and grew up.  Once he became king he returned there as regularly as he could, usually during the summer months when the British parliament was not sitting and he could safely be absent from his kingdom.  On one such visit he showed that he was as capable of fun as any of his subjects.  In the summer of 1740, George had been widowed for some three years and had an acknowledged mistress, Amalie Sophie Marianne von Wallmoden who had recently been created Countess of Yarmouth.  His fourth daughter Mary had just been married to Friedrich II, Landgraf of Hessen-Kassel.  Her visit to Hanover with her new husband provided a perfect excuse for courtly festivities.

A description of some of the entertainments was provided by a visiting courtier and diplomat from Prussia, Baron Jakob Friedrich Bielfeld.  His letters were published in an English translation in London 1768-1770.  In the autumn of 1740, Beilfeld wrote of the ‘grand entertainments’ given by George II in Hanover, including a ‘superb masked ball’.  However, an even greater entertainment was to come:   

Some days after we had a grand masquerade at the opera hous [sic] at Hannover, which was finely illuminated with wax lights.  The number of masks was prodigious.  The king was in Turkish dress, the turban of which was ornamented with a magnificent egret of brilliants: this mask was very proper for a prince … because it disguises well, and has a commanding aspect.  Lady Yarmouth was in the habit of a Sultana.

Bielfeld was clearly dazzled by royalty.  Even so, his account contradicts the image of George II as invariably boring and miserly.  When the mood took him, the king clearly knew how to royally entertain himself, his court and his subjects.

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800

Visit our  exhibition Georgians Revealed

When he became King of Great Britain in 1714, George I was fifty-four years old.  He has routinely been dismissed in popular histories as an old, dull German prince who spoke no English.  In fact, the king had some spoken and written English.  He had good French, German and Latin.  He preferred to use French, a language also popular with the British upper classes.  As the ruler of Hanover, George had enjoyed and fostered a court culture strongly influenced by France and Italy.  He brought these tastes with him to England.

George I, frontispiece. The Annals of King George, Year the First. London, 1716. (1568/8697)

In London, George I occasionally attended the public theatres – his preference was for musical works, particularly the newly imported Italian opera.  However, in November 1718 a troupe of French comedians arrived in London to play at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre.  On 26 November the King attended a performance. He saw two farces adapted from plays by Molière and the Original Weekly Journal  for 29 November reported ‘we hear, his Majesty gave 100 guineas’ to the company. George had obviously enjoyed the show.

In later years, George I occasionally attended English plays and as a patron of Handel he continued to go to the opera.  By the 1720s, the most popular entertainment in London’s theatres was the pantomime – a show which used dancing, singing and farcical action derived from the commedia dell’arte, with sophisticated scenes and machines intended to dazzle audiences.  In January 1726, the new pantomime at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was Apollo and Daphne. The Daily Post for 18 March recorded the King’s visit:

Last Night His Majesty went to the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s-Inn Fields to see the Play of the Country Wife, and the Entertainment of Apollo and Daphne, in which was Perform’d a particular Flying on that Occasion, of a Cupid descending, and presenting his Majesty with a Book of the Entertainment, and then ascended.

The newspaper said nothing of the King’s reaction, but ‘the Audience seem’d much pleas’d’.  It is likely that the King enjoyed it too.

In the autumn of 1726 a company of Italian comedians arrived in London.  Their first performance, at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket on 28 September 1726, was both commanded and attended by the King with the Prince and Princess of Wales.  George I commanded every performance by the troupe while they were in London and attended at least eleven times.  He must have been among the company’s patrons. He obviously enjoyed the commedia dell’arte plays, with their swift, lively and bawdy action intermingled with dancing, which must surely have reminded him of the court entertainments of his younger years.

So, was George I really that dull?

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800

Further reading:
Ragnhild Hatton. George I. New haven and London, 2001
Harry William Pedicord. “By Their Majesties’ Command”. The House of Hanover at the London Theatres, 1714-1800. London, 1991.

Visit our exhibition Georgians Revealed

In 1787 the novelist Fanny Burney, then at court as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, encountered another royal servant the caricaturist Henry Bunbury (1750-1811).  He had been appointed Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, second son of George III, in that year.  They met only from time to time, usually at the tea table, but although he was endlessly amusing she did not take to him.  She confided to her journal that ‘His serious manner is supercilious & haughty, & his easy conversation wants rectitude in its principles’.  Bunbury did not meet with the serious little novelist’s approval, although she could not help but enjoy his caricatures.

From Harry Thornber, Henry William Bunbury (1889) RB.23.b.6363

By the time he came to court, Henry Bunbury was well established as an amateur artist and, particularly, a caricaturist.  Following his grand tour in the late 1760s, Bunbury began to produce a continual flow of drawings and etchings.  He had studied drawing in Rome in 1770 and, after his return to London, he began to exhibit at the newly established Royal Academy of Arts.  In 1780 Bunbury was described by the art-lover Horace Walpole as ‘the second Hogarth’.  Walpole (son of Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole) had become an admirer of the artist from the very first exhibition of Bunbury’s works.

From Harry Thornber, Henry William Bunbury (1889) RB.23.b.6363

Bunbury’s drawings and engravings capture many aspects of Georgian life, from experiences on the grand tour to scenes from popular novels and from Shakespeare, caricatures of city businessmen and illustrations showing the comical accidents of horse-riders.  His most famous caricature is A Long Minuet as Danced at Bath, published in 1787 (Walpole quickly acquired a copy).  Bunbury obviously regarded it as important, for in 1789 he was portrayed by Sir Thomas Lawrence working on it.  He was one of a number of gentleman amateur artists who were creating works of social satire during the later 18th century.  Their status precluded them from images that were too pointed or too cruel.  Nevertheless, Bunbury’s work would later influence far more famous professional artists, including Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) and James Gillray (1756-1815), who had no such constraints.

Moira Goff
Curator, Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800

Further reading:
The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor. Oxford, 2011. Vol. 2 , 1787.
J.C. Riely, ‘Horace Walpole and “the second Hogarth”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9 (1975-6), 28-44.

Visit our new exhibition Georgians Revealed

If readers are looking for unusual Christmas presents, they should perhaps look no further than The Tower of Silence by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chaiwala Chevalier, a detective story featuring the fictional detective Sexton Blake who appeared in many British comic strips and novels throughout the 20th century. Until earlier this year, Chevalier’s manuscript lay unrecognised, languishing in the basement of the British Library, when it was published for the first time by the Princeton historian Gyan Prakash.

‘Parsee Tower of Silence, Bombay’, taken by Bourne and Shepherd in the 1880s. The towers of silence (dakhmas) are enclosed towers in which Zoroastrians expose the dead to be eaten by vultures (seen here ghoulishly lined up waiting), thus avoiding pollution of the sacred elements fire, water or earth. While they are no longer in use today in Iran, they are still used by Zoroastrians in India and Pakistan.  
India Office Photographs, Photo 576/(2)  

Gyan Prakash’s introduction ‘Looking for Mr Chaiwala’ is almost as exciting as the story itself. He describes how his eyes lit on the title as he was wading through historical documents in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room in 2001. The manuscript had originally been classified as a printed book but was in fact a copy of a typescript, one of 100 copies apparently published in May 1928 in Bombay. Immediately hooked, he was dismayed to find the India Office Library copy ended abruptly on page 169. After a hunt lasting two years, he finally tracked down a copy with the remaining eight chapters and the novel was published by Harper Collins earlier this year.
 

The title page of The Tower of Silence with the otherwise unheard of publisher’s stamp ‘P.J. Chavalier & Co. Commisariat Buildings’, and a blue crayon annotation indicating that details of the book are to be found in the quarterly list of publications from Bombay, 3rd quarter, 1928.
India Office Private Papers Mss Eur C285   

The novel is based on a historic event when on 25 August 1923 a London weekly, The Graphic, published an article on the Parsi tower of silence (dakhma) in Pune. Included in the article was a large aerial photograph showing corpses in the well of the tower. The photograph produced such a sense of outrage in Bombay that the Secretary of State for India was required to request the editor of The Graphic to destroy the photographic plate and negative.

The beginning of the story. In the typescript chapter one is preceded by a two-part introduction on the history of India and Zoroastrianism.
India Office Private Papers Mss Eur C285  

The story begins at 2pm on a cloudless afternoon in April with the click of a camera shutter. Beram, a sophisticated and devout Parsi, equally at home in London or Bombay, seeks revenge on the perpetrators of the sacrilegious act, hotly pursued by Sexton Blake and his assistant Tinker. The plot progresses via murders, cobras, mongooses, deadly spiders and hypnotism ending with a final dénouement which takes place (guess where) in a ‘tower of silence’.

If readers want to find out more about Zoroastrianism they should visit the exhibition: ‘The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination’, on view at the Brunei Gallery SOAS until 15 December (one day extension by special arrangement), and of course they should read our posts on Zoroastrianism in the Asian and African Studies Blog (search for ‘Zoroastrian’).

Ursula Sims-Williams
Asian and African Studies 

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Further reading:
Chaiwala, Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier, and Gyan Prakash. The Tower of Silence. Harper Collins Publishers India, 2013.

File 5203 - Action taken regarding offence caused to Parsis over the publication of a photograph of the interior of the Parsi Tower of Silence; newspaper apology [file includes photograph]   IOR/L/PJ/6/1862, File 5203 : Sep-Oct 1923

Today we have a story from guest blogger Jocelyn Watson about how the British Library collections have helped her to write a play based on the life of Cornelia Sorabji.

For Christmas 2011 my brother gave me a present of a book.  I unwrapped it to discover An Indian Portia by Kusoom Vadgama.  I had never heard of the book before and I looked at my brother quizzically; his response was:  ‘Believe me, you’ll find it fascinating’.  Sure enough, I was gripped.  The book was the diligent compilation of the letters, diaries and articles of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman in history to read law at Somerville College and one of India’s first female barristers.

From Cornelia Sorabji, India Calling (1934)    

Before becoming a writer, I was a lawyer and had studied law at Somerville’s sister college in Cambridge, Girton.  As my interest grew I began trawling the British Library archives.  The staff were so helpful and supportive and I was delighted to discover a wealth of material about this extraordinary woman.  I came across the law paper that she sat in 1889 and looked through it wondering how I would have managed.  The Master of Balliol College had obtained congregational consent for Cornelia to be able to sit the examination; the sole woman in a hall full of male students many of whom disapproved.

IOPP/MSS Eur F165/118

My Mother is Indian and my father English and when I asked family and friends in India, none of them had heard of Cornelia.  Similarly in England when I asked friends, former law students, they too knew nothing about her.  The more I delved into the rich resources that the British Library holds, the more I learnt and understood how invisible women’s histories can become, and how important it is that we acknowledge the women who have gone before us.  I was so grateful that the British Library had so carefully preserved all this valuable material.  

As a result I wrote Cornelia Calling and with the help and support of Kali Theatre Company, a charity that supports and encourages South Asian women to write, I was able to bring Cornelia Sorabji, a lawyer, a social reformer, an author, an extraordinary woman, to life.   The play is to be performed in London at the Tristam Bates Theatre on Friday 13 December at 7.30pm as part of the Kali Talkback 2013.

Jocelyn Watson

The author and actress Mary Robinson (1758-1800) became known as ‘Perdita’ following her appearances in that role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane in 1779.  She was briefly the mistress of George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), a liaison which gave her lasting notoriety. ‘The Perdita’ (as newspapers routinely styled her) was one of London’s leading celebrities during the 1780s.  She was also a fashion icon, as newspaper reports of the time attest.

Frontispiece from Mary Robinson. Poems. London, 1791.  

The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser of 11 June 1781 recorded her ‘in a most becoming military attire (scarlet faced with apple green)’.  In the autumn of 1781, ‘Perdita’ went to Paris (the centre of the fashionable world) for the first time.  On 15 October 1782, the Morning Herald reported ‘The Perdita has received a dress from Paris, which was introduced this Autumn by the Queen of France’.  The same paper on 21 November 1782 identified it as the ‘Chemise de la Reine’, worn by Perdita to the opera.  The chemise de la reine was a flowing muslin gown without hoops, fastened with a silk sash, suitable for private and country wear – Marie Antoinette was portrayed wearing it by the painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783.  Was this indeed the fashion in which Mrs Robinson appeared at the opera? Or was it, perhaps, closer to the ‘morning dress’ worn by the Queen of France at Versailles, as described in some detail in the Lady’s Magazine for April 1782:

The robe is made of plain sattin, chiefly white, worn without a hoop, round, and a long train.  It is drawn up in front, on one side, and fastened with tassels of silver, gold, or silk, … this discloses a puckered petticoat of gauze or sarsenet, of a different colour. …

Such a gown was surely more suitable for an appearance at one of London’s most elite entertainment venues.  The use of satin and the elaborate trimmings of this gown distinguish it from the chemise de la reine, except that the Lady’s Magazine also tells readers that ‘the dress, … it is said, will be worn throughout the summer, made of lighter material’ suggesting that it might have been an earlier version of Marie Antoinette’s informal dress.

Moira Goff
Curator Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800 

Further reading:
Claire Brock. “Then smile and know thyself supremely great”: Mary Robinson and the “splendour of a name”. Women’s Writing, 9.1 (2002), pp. 107-124
Paula Byrne. Perdita: the life of Mary Robinson. London, 2004
Aileen Ribeiro. The art of dress: fashion in England and France 1750-1820. New Haven & London, 1995

Visit our new exhibition Georgians Revealed

Salim Rashid Suri (1910-1979) was an Omani Sowt singer and ‘ūd player who became famous as the ‘Singing Sailor’.  He developed a truly unique style which took influence from musical sources across the Middle East and India.

Suri’s passion for music was anathema to his family: his elder brother threatened to shoot him unless he stopped singing.  Fleeing to pursue the music he loved, Suri sailed with commercial ships to ports in East Africa, India and around the Middle East.  From the recordings and the testimonies of his children we can begin to piece together his life.

Salim Rashid Suri, drawn by an Omani artist in the 1980s, copyright Saeed al Suri

Salim Rashid Suri was born in Sur, Oman, though he spent most of his life in India, Bahrain and Kuwait.  He began by singing al maidan, a form of sung poetry, accompanying himself on a one-stringed drone instrument, but his reputation resides in his distinctive style of Sowt al Khaleej (‘Voice of the Gulf’), an urban form principally developed and performed by musicians from Bahrain and Kuwait.  Sur was a pivotal trade port connecting Oman with Yemen, East Africa, Zanzibar, India and ports along the coastlines of the Gulf and is still regarded as one of the main centres of traditional Omani music.  Undoubtedly, Suri’s development of the sowt tradition was influenced by the trade links animating the town.

Suri began working on commercial vessels in Sur, later visiting ports in Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, India and East Africa.  He learned sowt from recordings of the singer Abd el-Latif al-Kuweiti (1901/1904–1975) and from other practicing musicians. His son, Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri, said of his father that ‘he left Sur with a good voice, but didn’t know how to sing’.  It was during his travels that Suri’s music developed and in Aden he first encountered the ‘ūd.

In the early 1930s Suri settled in India.  He lived in the port area of Bombay working first as a ‘boiler controller’ on a steamship before becoming a broker and translator helping Arab merchants to buy goods in Bombay and transport them to the ships.  He recorded twelve shellac (78 rpm) discs with HMV, which sold for around 50 Indian Rupees apiece.  Their commercial success was assured partly by the Arab population in Bombay, but also by his interest in Indian music and the use of Urdu in his songs.

Suri left India in the late 1940s and settled in Bahrain where he became a sought-after freelance artist.  By the 1960s, his own record label, Salimphone, recorded widely in the region with musicians such as Abd el-Latif al-Kuweiti and Mahmud al-Kuweiti.  However, because Suri’s records were only suitable for gramophones, the advent of vinyl records (45 rpm) in the early 1960s damaged his business prospects and he returned to Oman in 1971.  There he found work with the Sultan who made the singer a consultant for cultural affairs. Suri performed songs eulogising the ruler and his family which were widely broadcast on Oman’s recently established TV and radio stations.

Suri had come full circle.  As traveller and seafarer his music encapsulated the centuries-old cultural exchange of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Peninsula.  By the time he died in 1979, Suri was being hailed as an icon of the Omani nation for his contribution to sowt al-Khaleej.

Rolf Killius
Gulf History Curator Oral & Musical Culture

British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership Programme

Qatar Digital Library

This story is based on an interview with Salim Rashid Suri’s son, Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri conducted by Edward Fox on 21 November 1990 and subsequent email conversations between Rolf Killius and Sa‘id. 

Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri is also a versatile musician and singer. He was born in 1954, received his main education in Bahrain and presently lives in Oman where he moved with his parents when he was eighteen years old. From 1975 to 1978 he studied music in Egypt.

Listen to recordings of Sa‘id Salim Ali Suri.